SanDisk announces 200GB microSD card, 32GB Dual USB Drive with reversible Type-C connector, 128GB iXpand Flash Drive with Lightning connector
Context & Ripple Effects
This March 2015 launch is SanDisk pushing on two fronts at once: density in removable storage and the connector handoff. The 512GB microSD card Microdia announced months later at roughly $1,000 shows how contested that capacity race was about to become — a race that ends four years out with SanDisk shipping the first 1TB microSD card for $450.
The connector side of the announcement is equally forward-looking: a Dual USB Drive with a reversible Type-C plug arrives just before LaCie's USB-C external drive for the new MacBook, and the same port later gets doubled throughput when the USB 3.2 specification promises up to 20Gbps over existing Type-C cables. Samsung's move to 256GB UFS NAND chips for phones and tablets is the parallel track — storage migrating onto the motherboard instead of into a card slot.
First-order effects
- SanDisk's 200GB card raises the ceiling for what phones with expandable slots can carry without swapping cards, while its Lightning iXpand gives iPhone users the off-device storage Apple's fixed-capacity lineup doesn't offer natively.
Second-order effects
- Microdia's $1,000 512GB entry forces the pricing question: if premium cards sell near a dollar per gigabyte, SanDisk's roadmap to higher capacities has to undercut that or concede the top tier.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — capacities doubling while prices per gigabyte fall, and Type-C becoming the single reversible port — the card slot's long-term role shrinks against soldered flash like Samsung's UFS chips and fast external drives.
The trend: Flash storage is racing toward terabyte-scale densities while connectors consolidate around reversible Type-C, squeezing removable media between cheaper onboard NAND and faster external drives.